Hi there guys, what ever that guy says about that question does not matter at all. The situation as it is now is that religion is interlaced with the power structures in most countries & the leaders of the countries are usually compromised by this situation of the abuse of power; that is a fact.

How can this be used as any kind of defense? One of the foundational rules of British Law (upon which a lot of American Law is still based) is that 'ignorance of a law is no defense in law'. Whether you know (or knew) or not that a crime was a crime when you broke it, you still will be punished to the extant of that law.

This is clearly a legal deposition, and if you've ever sat through one of those you know that the insurance attorney gives you strict instructions to be accurate but not volunteer information. In this case, the deposition involves events from the 1980s. The bishop is not a defendant in the case, he is only being called as a witness to events from 30 years ago. As with all sources of information, it's worth considering the motives of a plaintiff's attorney releasing a small excerpt of a very long deposition, and the inherent conflict of interest there.

Going back to the raw data, a full transcript of the deposition can be found at http://www.stltoday.com/archbishop-robert-j-carlson-deposition/pdf_... . Relevant section is at page 109. This exchange comes as a result of a leading question by the plaintiff's attorney on whether he felt the therapist or the archdiocesan officials were more to blame. I haven't read the entire thing, so I'm not sure where that line of questioning was going.

The context of the question seems to be not about whether having sex with children was a crime, but whether failing to report (mandatory reporting for clergy) was a crime at the time. I wouldn't know that without looking it up either (it was not). At least that seems to be what he was responding to, not whether abusing kids was a crime.